February 28, 2010

Aspire easyStore H340 Mod #1

Bought the Home Server yesterday, and I did the first mod today (really speechless about my pairs of itchy hands…). Anyway, I noticed that the system runs quite hot. With the stock 120mm fan running at 900+rpm, CPU idle at 60c+, while System temp is at around 50c+ (non air-cond room).

The stock fan (from AVC, Taiwan) was attached to a pair of nice metal bracket with rubber type feet, to reduce vibration I suppose, although you can hardly feel any when it’s only spinning below 1k rpm. Anyway, the fan was sitting more towards the top side to blow directly on the 4 HDD bays. It’d be better if it can blow those heatsinks on the mobo too.

I replaced the stock 120mm with a Cooler Master 140mm unit. The 140mm wouldn’t fit on the bracket. So forget about mounting it onto the bracket, I used cable tie to hold it, slightly tilted so that it can blow on the heatsinks too. Fan speed is around 1050rpm. The result, everything is cooler inside this small casing now. CPU is max at 52c under 80% usage, while System is staying at 40c. The screen shot below was taken when the server was idling.

In conclusion:

Before

After

CPU Temp

Idle

60c+

48c+

Load

70c+

52c+

System Temp

Idle

50c+

38c+

Load

60c+

40c+

It’s quite a good improvement consider the fan cost only RM29.

Next mod: larger heatsink, if I can find a suitable one in the local market, or perhaps a larger PC casing.

* Note: My Q6600 @ 3.3GHz / 1.424V is idle at around 36c under a CM V8. So…gonna try to reduce another 12c on the server…

Hi there. Sorry for the belated reply. It's been quite some times since I last visited this blog.

Anyway, does it worth the money? Well, I'm happy with it. I use it mainly for media storage and streaming. I have all my 1080p mkv files stored on it and stream to the living room via gigabit network and it has never given me a problem.

Consider the ease to use and setup, yea, it does worth what I paid for. Cheers! :)